Monthly Archives: November 2014

While investigating a serious performance issue over the last 24 hours I discovered an issue whereby some of our CSS files were being combined but were not being rewritten by mod_pagespeed. After much hair pulling, far too many hours spent in front of curl, vim, less and friends, I finally tracked down the solution. I added a ModPagespeedLoadFromFile directive for every CDN domain and now all our resources are being properly rewritten.

I think, but I’m not sure, that mod_pagespeed tries to retrieve from the same domain as the request arrives on. So if you’re rewriting resources from example.tld onto cdn.xmpl.tld, when the request arrives at mod_pagespeed with a Host header of cdn.xmpl.tld, mod_pagespeed tries to look up every resource on the cdn.xmpl.tld hostname, instead of doing a reverse lookup through the ModPagespeedShardDomain directive.

Interestingly, this only seemed to affect our primary CSS file. Our print.css and javascript appeared to be unaffected. Strange. Very glad I can put this one to bed.